Posts Tagged ‘arduino’

Hour three, my soldering-iron-induced second degree burns continue to swell and blister on my left thumb and forefinger. Typing the word ‘the’ hurts pretty bad (though not as much as the word ‘pretty’) and I have lost my ability to be an ambi-spacer. I spent four hours soldering a paperduino today and that was not a good idea. Two reasons–the first: it turns out that building a paperduino takes something like four-hundred hours (I’m exaggerating, but it’s a lot) and the second reason: because the paperduino uses paper instead of printed circuit board, you have to connect every individual component with wire and solder. Somewhere in the second or third hour of soldering tiny components together and making sure that there were still nanometers of padding between the bird’s nest of exposed wires, hot metal and circuit components, I decided to move the metal stand holding the soldering iron to make the process a little safer (wouldn’t want to get burned, would I?). What I failed to grasp was that a metal stand in contact with a hot iron for two and a half hours will be hot. What I succeeded in grasping was a near-molten-hot soldering iron stand. It felt like cupping the devil’s ballsack. Seriously.

If you are thinking about getting into playing with the Arduino, just shell out the $25 and buy one. As I continue to work on my first Instructable–code named “Project Sunrise”–I plan to use the Arduino I got from Adafruit. Today’s class wasn’t all bad. I learned how to solder and got many many hours to practice. In the future, I’ll just have to remember to better respect hot things, lest zacklab be burned to the ground.